A significant number of people wear headwear with an attached brim, perhaps a baseball cap being the most common or popular of such items. The invention described in this document pertains to the field of brimmed headwear in general, and to baseball caps in particular.
The baseball cap consists of a crown portion to accommodate at least part of the wearer's head and an attached brim portion. The brim commonly consists of top and bottom pieces of fabric with a visor typically sandwiched in between the pieces. As such, the visor is generally (semi-) rigid and serves as the core layer of the brim. Visors can consist of a single piece or of multiple pieces. Visors can consist of one material or a variety of materials. Often a plastic or cardboard material with a thickness not much greater than 3 millimeters is used.
The functions of a brim vary from protecting the wearer's eyes and face from weather elements such as sun and rain, to enhancing the headgear's appearance for aesthetic purposes. A great many alterations have been made to the visor with these purposes in mind. Of note, Boo Yl Park, U.S. Pat. No. 6,408,443, proposes to have the inner & outer portions of the visor to be partially cut at predetermined intervals, primarily so as to allow the visor of a reversible headwear piece to maintain a desired curved shape when bent along the cut lines. Also, part of the patent application by Tai-Kuang Wang, US patent application 20040006807, suggests making cuts or cut-out holes to both the visor as well as the crown portion of the headwear for aesthetic and air ventilation purposes.
While a certain level of visor stiffness is indeed necessary to properly perform the functions mentioned at the top of the prior paragraph, using a (semi-) rigid material in the brim has a major negative drawback: pressure is exerted to the wearer's head in the areas where the visor is attached to the headwear's crown portion, typically the forehead area with baseball caps, creating significant discomfort.
Attempts have been made to address this discomfort. Luke Evan Landers, US patent application 20030106135, has proposed to use a much softer overall material for the entire visor. Nevertheless, this severely diminishes a brim's much coveted capability to retain a desired shape. In an attempt to properly accommodate the varying shapes and sizes of the headwear's crown portion David Turner, U.S. Pat. No. 7,278,173, elected to insert slits into the visor, subdividing the visor into portions, so that the brim could expand in width if needed as a result of a stretching of the crown portion of the headwear. However, additional comfort is only achieved to the extent that such portions can move relative to one another. The portions in and of themselves do not provide any cushioning solution to direct pressure. An alternative approach has been to use a visor consisting of multiple pieces and multiple materials. The filing of Hui Tseng, in US patent application 20050235395, and the filing of Jon Kazuo Taguchi, in US patent application 20060174397, both describe visor embodiments that use this approach. Such embodiments typically include deformable and non-deformable portions, where the softer, more forgiving portion is positioned at the rear-end of the visor, i.e. where the visor is attached to the headwear's crown and thus most impacts the wearer's forehead area. Using multiple pieces and/or more than one material though, inevitably brings about a more complicated, more costly manufacturing process.
Alas, no prior art provides an optimal solution that combines great functionality with cost efficiency.